Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter
“I have told you this that you might have peace in me. In the world you have trouble, but take courage. I have conquered the world.” - John 16:32-33
As we enjoy this final week of the Easter season and enter into the beautiful month of June, soon the comforting paraclete will arrive on Pentecost. These are joyful days. As Saint Augustine wrote, “We are Easter people and Alleluia is our song!”
Over the centuries various Christians have, as a people, experienced more Good Fridays than Easter Sundays. Generational trauma is a real thing creating caution and anxiety that is hard to shake from generation to generation. This I believe to have been true for my own Irish family. Like the Jews, Afro-Americans and too many others, it has been our faith and our humor that has sustained us.
I always thought that my mother was much more comfortable with Lent than with Easter. I used to joke that whenever she got into the passenger seat of my car that I had to have all the windows rolled down so the perpetual cross beam she carried on her shoulders would fit through. Given Ireland’s sad history, suffering made more sense than joy. Life was a vale of tears. Sadness was more predictable, more familiar. Contentment was temporary. W B Yeats quote fit so well, “Being Irish, they had an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained them through temporary periods of joy.”
The photo above is of the Dublin shrine for the genocidal Irish famine victims. I visited it in 2006 and hope to do so again next month when our entire family sets out on a pilgrimage to Erin. It is eerie and heart breaking.
From 1841-1851 the Irish population dropped by ⅓ with 3 million people disappearing — ½ through death and ½ through immigration. All the while the British sat on their hands with a prevailing attitude that it was an act of God to thin out the Roman Catholic population.
Yet even in the face of troubles my mother and grandmother would say, “It can always be worse.” In today’s passage from the fourth Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that things are going to get worse, but that they will get better. “Take courage, I have conquered the world” (John 16:33).
Whenever I slip into Irish melancholy, I remind myself that we are Easter people and not Good Friday people, Jesus has won the victory for us, we need not fret, and that the purpose of suffering is to fine-tune us to be the person God has meant us to be.
Suffering is not our ultimate landing place. Joy is. And Alleluia is our song.
—Timothy J. Cronin